A blog devoted to my interests which include anarchism and social movements, history, archeology, and anything else I choose to write about.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Anders Breivik and the Consequences of Far Right Propaganda

“Ideas have consequences” is a favorite mantra of the far-right. It's usually sprung on some mildly pink college professor who happens to refer favorably to Marx in a lecture. “The ultimate result of the Marxist ideology you spout is the Gulag and Pol Pot”, bellows the right-wing pundit. Funny though, this same pundit would never suggest that Jesus is responsible for the Inquisition or Martin Luther for the Holocaust. But then consistency was never part of the right wing mind set.

However this very week, instead of a spurious, fabricated causal chain, with the Norwegian Massacre we have a real example of how ideas have consequences.. Over the last three decades there has been an endless right-wing propaganda barrage attacking liberals, leftists, socialists, immigrants, the poor and a host of other groups too numerous to mention. (1) This is not just a matter of saying “We disagree with leftists etc...” The right wing propagandists make out that the people they oppose are the enemy of God and man, are absolutely evil and subhuman, hardly better than child molesters.

Must we be surprised that as a result of this hate propaganda and demonization, that someone on the fringes of the far right picks up a gun and starts killing a bunch of those immigrant-loving leftist devils?

Now comes the right-wing response to the murders. “Not our fault”, “Don't make political capital out of this tragedy.”, “Oh, he was crazy, doesn't have anything to do with us.” We see that the people who bellow about ideas having consequences don't really believe it after all. The slogan is only a stick to beat the left with. No surprise there though. I already mentioned that if they were consistent, they would claim Jesus responsible for the Inquisition. (2)

Before some nitwit accuses me of thinking Jesus caused the Inquisition, I am only saying that it makes as much sense to claim Marx responsible for the gulag as it would to claim Jesus responsible for the Inquisition.

9 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Your comment about nitwits taking things out of context reminds me of letters I write to my local piece-of-crap-Black-Press-owned paper, and the retort letters by hotheads who can extract unbelievable assumptions which make for their whole "thesis" which tries to debunk my original letter. Too bad a lot of pinheads want the world explained to them in sound bites.

I think you are only familiar with neo-conservatives. Leftists of every kind need to start educating themselves on the various branches of conservatism. After all, its people on your side of the fence who claim to detest lumping people into generalized groups, right? Paleoconservatives and classic conservatives have nothing to do with this man. Classic conservatives (think Pat Buchanan, NOT Glenn Beck) are against most foreign wars, globalism and man are even in favor of having some form of single-payer health care system. I could say this until I'm blue in the face but you still wouldn't believe it because, like most left-wingers, you believe what you want to believe and see what you want to see. Its subconscious, it defines you as "leftists" and to have an open mind about classic conservative ideology scares the piss out of you. From what I've seen, a lot of you make your minds up before you even hear an issue. Take the case of Jared Loughner, for example. Leftists the world over scraped the bottom of the barrel to find any and ever excuse to believe he was a right-winger. Turns out, he was a nut with no solid political ideology. Not that you would agree with any paleoconservative or classic conservative beliefs either, but, just as you don't like being labeled as "Marxists" or "Peaceniks", we don't like being labeled all as Glenn Beck, Fox News watching right-wingers. That shit is pop culture, get your facts before you point fingers. The problem we have with people on your side of the fence is that you think you're railing against the status quo, when in fact you ARE the status quo. Its so easy to say "I'm against racism" or "power to the people" or "I'm pro-women's rights". This is all vague, empty rhetoric with little depth. And when someone does shout this from the hilltops, its applauded, especially by mainstream media. Its so easily digestible. Its getting to the point where to even say you're a Christian is becoming a rebellious statement. I mean, do you really, really, really want to live in a world where only YOUR opinion is manifested into reality? I certainly don't. As much as I disagree with you and people on your side of the fence, I would never take away your right to say it. I am not so certain you'd do the same for us, though.

I am well aware of the difference between genuine conservatives and the dominant variety of "conservative". My apologies for not making this plain in the posting, but the phony corporate whore, war-loving, community destroying types vastly overshadow the older kind of conservative. Your movement got taken over by radical corporatists. As I often say, "What exactly do "conservatives" wish to conserve?" I come from an old fashioned Canadian Tory background myself. I too "have been talking till I am blue in the face" about the difference. Most people I know on the left are aware of the difference. Nor am I afraid of genuine conservatism as some of it forms the foundation of my thinking.

As for "us" being the status quo, that is a real knee slapper. I belong to the IWW and I don't exactly see the mass media helping out our organizing campaigns!

As I pointed out in detail on Renegade Eye's blog, the biggest mass-murders in history have come from the left and its ideas, as have the most prolific (and the majority of Europe's) terrorist groups (before the Jihdists.)

For an adherent of the extreme left to make this kind of exploitative moralising is as obscene as it is absurd.

SentinelYou are wrong. In the example I use of the pinko prof who says something positive about Marx

1.Marx was no more responsible for the gulag than Jesus for the Inquisition – as I point out.

2.Except for a handful of Maoist nutbars no one thinks Pol Pot or Stalin should be emulated.

3. Even when Stalinism was an important political tendency, the non-Stalinist left was far larger. Thus it is wrong to tarnish “the left” with the crimes of one section of it.

The other point is we are dealing with hate propaganda. The far right spouts hate against a long list of groups and works these into conspiracy theories. The left on the other hand has a structural or systemic view of things, i.e. the problem is the capitalist system, authoritarianism, racism etc. not individuals or groups. Now we might slag certain representatives of these structures or systems, but we do not spend the inordinate amount of time at it that the right does with its hate list.

In order to counter what I wrote in my article you would have to prove that we engage in the same level of hate propaganda in a concerted, systematic level in our media and organizations.

I am not wrong at all Larry. The politics that Marx espoused has led to the deaths of more then 100 million - given that he advocated genocide (and was a virulently anti-Semitic to boot) it is hardly surprising.

Lenin and Trotsky were responsible for countless murders - especially of striking workers, so lets not pretend it was all Stalin and Mao. They kicked off the secret police and the GULAG.

The far left's overt message is hate propaganda aimed at specific strata's of society across nations - people identified solely on a social construct, and the message is their elimination from society, and history has shown us how this is done by the far left.

Even this Norwegian tragedy is being exploited by the far left - the murder of children exploited - to further the defamation and instigation of banning all opposition to what has been a complete and unmitigated disaster: The failure that is 'multiculturism' as a step to that of the socialist wet dream of supplanting Europeans in their homelands.

Its so see-through its pathetic.

All leftist media and representatives do is scream abuse at political opponents, use labels and smears designed to dehumanise and ruin, and pursue the banning of all opposition.

Sentinel,One should never accept something without investigating first. So more than 30 years ago I sat down and read – over a period of years – the entire works of Marx and Engels with the exception of the Grundisse – a collection of notes unpublished until the 1960s and Theories of Surplus Value – a history of economic theory. Coming from another political tradition, I had no Marxist axe to grind. No where in any of this was any indication that Marx and Engels sought state socialism or dictatorship. Indeed Engels quipped that if state socialism was the real socialism then Bismarck was the reddist of reds. What they did seek was “the free association of the producers or cooperative production”. The idea was to extend democracy into the economy. They also sought a multi-tendency workers party. If they are guilty of anything, it is social democracy and not Stalinism. They insisted on a multi tendency political party running for office, thus setting the stage for all those compromises that dilute the socialist message and with party centralisation, the inevitable “iron law of oligarchy” (of which they were plainly unaware, through no fault of theirs) which turns a revolutionary party into a moderate one.The idea that Marx and Engels democratic socialism somehow led to Stalinism is one of the most vicious lies ever concocted and it is the same as claiming the author of the Sermon on the Mount somehow gave rise to the auto de fe.

As for Lenin and Trotsky and the origins of Stalinism, that is a very complex issue. Better debate Ren on that one. All I will say – and I don't know if Ren agrees or not – is that the Bolsheviks by banning other revolutionary tendencies and then banning tendencies within their own party in 1921 set the stage for a sociopath like Stalin to take over.

Having argued with you before on various matters, I know this probably won't change your mind and therefore any further discussion of this matter is undoubtedly a waste of time and I don't wish to pursue it any further.

Trotsky on banning factions: “The sharp factional struggle inside the Bolshevik faction in the first period after the February Revolution and on the eve of the October Revolution is now well enough known (see for example, L. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution). After the conquest of power a sharp factional struggle broke out around the question of the Brest-Litovsk peace. A faction of Left Communists was formed with its own press (Bukharin, Yaroslavsky, and others). Subsequently, the Democratic Centralism and the Workers’ Opposition factions were formed. Not until the Tenth Party Congress, held under conditions of blockade and famine, growing peasant unrest, and the first stages of NEP – which had unleashed petty-bourgeois tendencies – was consideration given to the possibility of resorting to such an exceptional measure as the banning of factions. It is possible to regard the decision of the Tenth Congress as a grave necessity. But in light of later events, one thing is absolutely clear: the banning of factions brought the heroic history of Bolshevism to an end and made way for its bureaucratic degeneration.” (L. Trotsky, Writings 1935-6)